Second Catch of 2013...

I wanted to write this post as a companion to the First Catch of 2013 post, but as is the norm with me, some other things came in and delayed this till now...

So, this was a visit to the Best Books (permanent) shop at YMCA Secunderabad, not the Best Books ‘Sale’ (which is also held at YMCA, but in a different hall in the compound)...and this was some days after (i.e., in February) my visit to the ‘Sale,’ where I found Hammetts and a Chandler...I don’t know why I had this urge for book buying...maybe I hadn’t read any Spenser books in a while and was craving for some...I had unread Rankins at home, but Spenser is Spenser...

I started looking for Spenser novels...didn’t find any...was disappointed...then shifted my attention to other writers...Elmore Leonard...Peter Robinson...found three Robinsons...Cold is the Grave, Gallows View, and Friend of the Devil and two Leonards...Riding the Rap and When the Women came out to Dance... When the Women came out to Dance is a book of short stories by Leonard, which I thought was a good find...the previous week at the ‘Sale,’ I had found a book of short stories by Dashiel Hammett, The Continental Op and the next week I find Leonard’s short stories...good, I thought...it would be a really interesting study to compare the crime fiction novels and crime fiction short stories by the same author...I started reading Leonard’s short stories the next day and found them equally spicy and crackling as his novels...and the stories I read, each one was self contained...and some months back I had found Ian Rankin’s short stories at the same venue...rather nice...I must find out if other crime fiction writers too have written short stories...

I went around the shop once again trying and hoping to make some of the books look attractive to me... stopped by a stack of Len Deighton books...I have been looking at the Great Trilogy for some years now but have put them back every time I picked them up... I don’t know... after all these years, I thought, why not...and picked up the Berlin Game, Mexico Set, and London Match ... a long-due acquisition I think...